Temperance, Liberalism, and Nationalism in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires

Abstract

Chapter 4 turns to temperance and liberalism within the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. In Germany, liberals promoted temperance not through social movements that had no hope of penetrating the closed autocracy, but as incremental policy reforms within the autocratic bureaucracy. Their primary target was the exploitative East Prussian Junker aristocracy and their high-proof schnapps. Along with the “cult of the offensive,” in the lead-up to World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German high command promoted what this chapter calls the “cult of military sobriety”—that a sober army will be a victorious one—which would be emulated worldwide with the outbreak of the Great War. Meanwhile, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the temperance cause is taken up by liberal nationalists, such as Czechoslovak founding father Tomáš Masaryk, who made the case for abstinence, democratic liberation, and self determination.